Can ‘Southern Hospitality’ Replace ‘Vanderpump Rules’?

I did not watch seasons one or two of Southern Hospitality in their entirety because they were bad. I guess it just didn’t feel like anyone really had any skin in the game. Other than Maddi Reese, who was miserable because she was dating an asshole, no one on the cast’s life was messy enough to be interesting. But I can forgive a boring freshman/sophomore season—what’s that thing people say about the first pancake?—because Junior year is usually when things start to get interesting anyway. And thus, I am writing to you now to propose that SH serve as a replacement for Vanderpump Rules, which is currently in limbo.

A primer: Southern Hospitality is a spinoff of Southern Charm, set in Charleston, South Carolina. It’s like Vanderpump Rules in that it follows the comings and goings of the 20- and 30-somethings working at Republic, a bar/club owned by SC cast member Leva Bonaparte, but it’s unlike Vanderpump Rules in that Leva is barely a character on the show. Frankly, though, I could do with less of Lisa Vanderpump on VPR, so that’s fine with me. At this point in time, the cast is very much still working at Republic as bartenders, waitresses, hostesses, general managers, etc. This is a refreshing change from VPR, where the cast all got too famous for being on the show to work at SUR anymore, which gave the later seasons a sort of homeless quality—like they’d lost grip of their original concept but couldn’t find a better one so they all tried (and mostly failed) to open their own bars instead of working at Lisa’s.

It’s this investment in the business that begat the show that I think makes SH successful. The cast is treating it like just another job, and not the thing that’s going to shoot them to stardom. (They probably saw how that went for the VPR folks and decided they’d be better off without it.) This means that the show feels like the best kind of reality TV situation: a fly-on-the-wall POV. One gets the sense that the drama being documented would be happening whether the cameras were there or not. TJ Dinch and Joe Bradley would still be fighting but also maybe falling in love. Emmy Sharrett would still be crying over her deadbeat boyfriend, Will Kulp. Bradley Carter would still be walking around without a shirt on whenever it was even a little bit allowed. And I cannot stress this enough, they would all still be working at Republic because they need the jobs. Anyone getting cast on the VPR reboot right now was definitely not working at SUR six months ago, they just want their ticket to (West) Hollywood.

With the Housewives franchise feeling so overly dark lately, shows like Southern Hospitality, Southern Charm, and Summer House are a bright, fun light, and harken back to the original intent of reality television: shallow escapism.